to make a list of candidates he would approve and then ask the participants in the CM campaign to vote for 4 ( or depending on the slots) candidates, the ones that gather the most votes enter the campaign.
The problem with this approach is that he won't be able to balance the appearance of the signature across all the different boards he wishes to target, by observing how DS chooses the campaign candidates you can tell that he usually looks for the best canditiate/s within certain boards and not just the best overall, or else he would simply count on the number of earned merit, but that isn't the case.
Yep, I think a voting process would make the campaign like 90% Meta & Reputation board posters

I really don't envy Darkstar right now. Just to go through them all is going to be a mammoth task
DS, if it helps: if you get me a list of competing userIDs, I'll get you
a convenient list of their posts as if they were in this campaign in the past week.
Thanks for the offer! I think I'm fine without it, but I'll send you a PM if I need it

That's the list of all Applicants for This campaign
which won't be accepted, mate, nothing to worry about ...

Indeed, most won't be accepted, but there's a chance (max) 4 could get in though...
Although if the criteria didn't change, the actual number could be 0 o maybe 1

Time will tell...
There will be at least 1, no point wasting everyone (and my time) with a pointless application round
